By Colleen Dulle | America Magazine

(OSV News photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Near the end of the month-long meeting of the Synod on Synodality in Rome last October, Pope Francis surprised the assembly by speaking out against something about which he had grown increasingly concerned throughout the synod’s discussions: clericalism. The pope had spent most of his time at the assembly simply listening, perhaps because he was aware of his outsized influence in the room. On Oct. 25, he took to the microphone to deliver a discourse on the church as “the holy, faithful people of God,” who learn a simple faith from their “mothers and grandmothers.” He reminded the bishops and priests present that they “come from this people” and denounced those who “disfigure the face of the church with machismo and dictatorial attitudes.”